Special Report: Printers' Outlook: Not Your Father's (or Mother's) Book Manufacturers
Beisser: How can publishers maximize relationships with book manufacturing partners?
Spall: I think it's really important that we don't commoditize the physical book. If you walk into a bookstore today, more times than not, when you look at the books by the door, they're not beautiful books. They're produced with very low-quality tissue paper. As a reader, if I'm going to read a physical book, I want it to look good, and have good production value and good paper. If I was going to be encouraging publishers, I'd say, "Get with the printing community and ask what can we do to embellish books a little bit more than we did in the late 1990s and the early 2000s." … Consumers and readers that just want content will go to the e‑book. But there's still a slice of readers that want a physical book. We need to make that physical book a nice quality.